Constructive Dialogue Institute

We develop research-based educational tools, resources, and frameworks to equip schools, universities, and workplaces with a shared language and practical set of skills to build inclusive cultures and engage constructively across differences. While we began by developing educational tools for use in college classrooms, today, our research powers programs at hundreds of institutions across the country, including universities, high schools, companies, philanthropies, nonprofits, religious communities, and local governments. Through our work, we seek to strengthen our democracy by helping people recognize our shared humanity, embrace our differences as strengths, and work together to solve collective challenges.

To achieve our goal of reaching hundreds of thousands of students and educators in the years to come, we built a strategic plan plan around five objectives:
- Develop educator- and student-facing tools to promote pluralism, intellectual humility, and civil discourse in schools and universities.
- Scale our tools across educational settings to prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship.
- Execute a thought leadership agenda to establish the importance of intellectual humility and constructive dialogue to educational and civic outcomes and to position CDI as a leader in the space.
- Deliver turnkey solutions to adult audiences to satisfy demand and earn supplemental income.
- Build CDI's organizational infrastructure to sustainably achieve our goals.

CDI has grown to 12 full-time employees, including a leadership team (see bios below) who bring a depth of experience building high-quality learning tools, conducting rigorous research, scaling revenue, developing innovative and industry-leading partnerships, and helping early-stage organizations grow and mature.

Jonathan Haidt, Co-Founder & Chairman
Jonathan is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business and the Chairman of CDI. He is a social psychologist who studies morality; his current research investigates how to apply moral psychology to improve the functioning of companies, universities, and other complex social systems.

Caroline Mehl, Co-Founder and Executive Director
Caroline has expertise in translating psychological research into innovative real-world applications. She began her career at the private equity firm Blackstone, where she was involved in the firm’s inaugural Tactical Opportunities fund. Previously, Caroline was an Associate Research Scholar at NYU’s Stern School of Business. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale and her master’s degree from Oxford as a Blavatnik Foundation Scholar.

Jacob Fay, Education Director
Jacob has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics where his research focused on normative theories of injustice and their relation to educational policy and practice. Fay is co-editor of Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries (2019) and Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (2016). Prior to his role as postdoctoral fellow, he was a visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He holds an Ed.D and M.Ed from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an MA in American History from Brandeis University, and an AB in History from Princeton University. Fay was also a middle school history teacher in MA and NJ.

Mike Wasserman, VP of Growth
Mike leads CDI's program growth strategy, partnerships, and fundraising efforts. He brings 15 years of leadership experience in innovative, high-impact education organizations. Most recently, he served as Executive Director of the Boston Debate League and before that as the Massachusetts Executive Director of Bottom Line. He is currently a faculty member at the Institute for Nonprofit Practice. Mike earned his bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and Urban Education from Brown University and his MBA in Nonprofit Management from Boston University.

Mylien Duong, Sr. Research Director
Mylien has deep expertise in developing scalable behavioral interventions. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she was previously a senior research scientist at the Committee for Children, where she led research to develop a social emotional learning program for teachers in K-12 schools. Prior to that, she was faculty at the University of Washington. A researcher through-and-through, she she has received over $17 million in grant funding and published over 40 scientific articles and book chapters.

The main tool we developed to spread the practices of constructive dialogue is an online learning program called Perspectives. In the program, students explore the inner workings of the mind and gain insights to better understand themselves and others. Students also develop a robust toolkit of science-based practices to challenge cognitive biases, engage in nuanced thinking, and communicate more effectively with others about sensitive and divisive topics.

Since launching six years ago, our online learning program has been used by more than 55,000 learners across 1,900 college classrooms, 400 high school classrooms, and more than 600 organizations in 17 countries. Evaluation, including two randomized controlled trials, demonstrates that Perspectives is effective in reducing hostility across differences and dichotomous thinking and increasing a range of positive outcomes, including intellectual humility, growth mindset, and perspective-taking.

We have received an overwhelmingly positive response from our learners, including data showing that 90% of students and 97% of educators rate the program positively and 95% of educators agreed that it helps students consider diverse perspectives and would recommend the program to their peers. Additionally, even 6 months after using the program, 89% of learners said they benefited from and 78% of learners say they still use strategies in daily interactions.

As a research-focused organization, measurement is intrinsic to our success and is embedded into every layer of our work. We define success as maximizing our impact on learners by reducing outgroup hostility, fostering a sense of shared humanity, and equipping learners with the skills to communicate across differences. To measure our impact, we focus on two key categories of metrics: (1) effectiveness and (2) scale. To capture effectiveness, we measure a variety of metrics such as individual-level change in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to affective polarization, intellectual humility, and constructive dialogue. We also measure the culture of groups with whom we work to assess whether using CDI increases feelings of belonging and comfort expressing one's views. Our second category of metrics focuses on scale: how many individuals and organizations have been reached through our work